20 - Adding audio & music to your video

Hey Dan,
So you can get free music from Wistia, but what they really do is host videos, like YouTube/Vimeo and gather leads & information, correct?

Steve Law - 1 month ago

I use Envato elements for audio. it's like $16/mo and you get unlimited downloads. It's not just audio, but video, stock photos, graphics templates, WordPress plugins, and more. It's much more economical than a lot of other stock options out there. https://elements.envato.com

Hi in this video we are going to look at adding some background music or audio to your video. Okay so we are going to kind of rearrange things, going to drag this down so the time lines not so big and exposed, I’m going to twirl up you so we are a little less lost, and you can zoom in go to fit a nice little trick is as well when your zooming in and out, we use Command or Control minus and plus, either for Mac or PC, but if you’ve got a mouse like mine with a scroll wheel in the middle, just use your scroll wheel, okay, and if you just got to hover over in the middle here and then scroll wheel in and out it’s quite a nice way of doing it. So all we are going do is, we are going to first turn on, what you’ll have to do is you’ll have to unmute Dan, so there I am there, and you can turn me back on, there I am, ok I’m going to leave mine off just to make it easier for this tutorial, not… is I’m going to bring in some more, I’m going to bring in Audio, you can bring in anything you got waves MP4’s sorry MP3’s those are the main ones, Ogs any sort of audio file could come in. Now this audio that I’ve got here for you is, its produced by a company called Wistia, now Wistia are a video hosting site that I use and they offer free videos of few sound tracks and backgrounds, go and check their T & C’s to look for Wistia free audio, you will find these ones you can download and just have a look the T & C’s to see whether you can use them legally but we’re just going to use them for our tutorial in here.

Alright we have a couple of options one, two, three, you can pick and of them, on a Mac you can hit space bar, it previews it in browser quite cool, PC’s don’t, so I’m going to use the top one and I’m going to click open, and there it is there and to add to it you can do a couple of things, you can drag into the middle here, jazz it to it, or you can add it, click and hold and drag it down here you can see a black arrow hovering down I can drag on it, up to you. I find it with the audio at the bottom it doesn’t matter where it goes drag this along, space bar and I’m going to turn me on just for a second to get the sense of the balance in terms of who’s high and who’s low. I’m less than happy with that audio now that it’s in there, so you might have to do what I do and go through and download lots of audio and if you want to get audio there is two places if you want to get audio from, that I get audio from at least, one is called icestop.com and ones called adobestop.com or I think it is stopadobe.com it’s one of those two places, I’m going to use this one, who cares I’m going to add one, but it really transforms your audio sorry your video if you add a bit of backing music, so I’m going to add it and then I’m going to play with the volumes to get the balance right, that’s a bit more upbeat. Yeah it’s a bit more catchy so play around with the audio twirl this down, audio, and what we might do is I might start it, a like that up beat thing, but then when it gets from about then on I might lower it down to go underneath so it starts all catchy and playing music, what I’d like is to lower it down and you do key framing just like you do anything else, so I will just key frame there, just want it to be quite high there, but after maybe here I want to lower it down, so I’m going to lower it down by clicking and dragging decibels is a funny old digit, you put it into negative decibels its fine now what we might do is click on the wave form as well that can be quite handy to visually see, can you see if I drag this up down up down just to see or pace you can do the same thing with my talking head, you can turn me up or down if you need to, go to waveform, you can see me talking through there. Turn that back up, there we go, audio levels I’ve got two key frames, let’s make it look nice and easy, two key frames, one at negative 16 let’s go back here play. It’s pretty quiet underneath there so I might hold shift and get it back to that key frame so it snaps to it perfectly, lift it up a little bit, it becomes higher negative decibels, weird, I’m dancing here to this music, here is it so it’s in the background, that’s the trick, I know my first videos that I ever did for this type of thing my own tutorials, is that I always had the audios too high and people, everybody on line went, its great but the music’s too loud, I hate the intro music, so be careful when your using music that it’s not. I’m using this one music because it’s more like an intro video of in?? but I might not put it on every single audio so you will notice that your watching my video now I don’t have music under right now, it can be cool but you can get sick of it after 50 videos which is about this course, so just make sure audio is appropriate, you are allowed to use it legally.

What can happen is if you go off and steal music, so you go and pirate some music and try and add to the background and you try and use any sort of system like YouTube or YouKu, what will happen is, they have really cool automated systems, not cool for you, but cool for them, that automatically knows that that is a licensed bit of music, and unless you can prove to them that you have the licence for it they will, most of the time they will let you run the video but you won’t be able to generate any sort of ad revenue from it. Ad revenue for me for some of my free stuff is really useful, so I’ve got to make sure I’m using music that I’m allowed to, and when you do get it make sure you download the licence. Some of them might say you can use it commercially but you have to have a link to it, and that just might just mean that on your website where its being viewed you have a link to it whether is YouTube or YouKu you might have it in the comments section and if you have the audio sometimes they might want it in the credits, you might have to add credits to the end of you video so that you can say audio supplied by Wistia or whoever else it is, so just double check before, and know that you might get caught out, it’s just something that everyone gets caught out with before, they think they’ve got usage of it but they don’t. One last thing is that I speak about this because I have gone through the pain already, is I’ve used something say from iStock and I’ve paid for it and I’m legally allowed to use it, but YouTube and YouKu don’t know that, but what is I had to go I had to go to iStock and say hey I need an audio release and I emailed them, and they said sure, and they faxed me or they emailed me an audio released signed document from person who made the music, I then gave that to the YouTube people and then everybody was happy but it took a couple of weeks to sort that out. You’ve got your own music or can make music, but just make sure that you get the rights to use it. Alright that long winded spiel it’s pretty to have audio just dump it on here and lower it up and down and that’s it for audio.